The feature film depicts the difficulties of a family of Catalan farmers jostled by modernity. The director, who turned with non-professional actors, dedicated his prize “to people who grow the land”.
Le Monde with AFP
The German festival, the Berlinale, awarded Wednesday, February 16, the Golden Bear to the Alcarras film of the Spanish filmmaker Carla Simon, a tender and deep portrait of a family of farmers jostled by modernity.
Carla Simon, 35, who turned with non-professional actors, dedicated his price “to people who grow the land”, highlighting the importance of agriculture for society and their work to “fill our Plates “. The director, who lost his parents very young and grew up near this little town of Alcarras, thanked his family, “who cultivated fisheries and without which [she] would never have been so close to this world.” She had already received a prize from the first film in Berlin for Summer 1993 (2017).
The President of the Jury, the American director, Mr. Night Shyamalan, praised the performance of the actors who knew how to show the tenderness and the fight of a family “and highlight” our dependence to the earth “. Ode to small Spanish farmers, Alcarras takes place the time of a summer in a corner of Catalonia bathed in the sun.
“hardly for future” for small family farms
The film follows the sole family, which has been growing hundreds of fishermen on the land of wealthy owners for three generations. But these want to uproot the trees to install solar panels and propose to the sole to adapt to this new deal, or leave. The head of the family, Quimet, refuses to see his world disappear.
Around him, it’s all a fragile family balance, children to the elderly, who threatens to collapse. All actors are filmed with great tenderness. The film is both delicate and deep on the issues of forced modernization of campaigns or conflict between economy and ecology.
The director does not see “much future” for small family farms. “There is very little price regulation, and more and more large companies,” she explained in an interview on Tuesday at the France-Press agency (AFP). “I see only in organic farming,” she added.
Better realization for the French Claire Denis
Carla Simon succeeds Romanian Radu Jude, who had received the Golden Bear last year. The organizers can welcome to have, at the price of drastic sanitary measures, conducted the competition after an ersatz of festival, online only, in 2021. Only shadow in the table: the absence of a big name of the cinema , the French Isabelle Huppert, who was to be given a reward for all of his actress career. Sick of Covid-19, she had to give up the trip to Berlin.
With the French Julia Ducournau, Palme d’Or in Cannes, and Audrey Diwan, Golden Lion in Venice, there are three young directors who have been rewarded in the latest editions of the major European festivals.
The rest of the palmares of the Berlinale is also dominated by women, including a price of the best achievement in the French Claire Denis for with love and fierceness and a price “non-genreal” of the best interpretation to the actress German-Turkish Meltem Kaptan.